Re-Discovery 3

Ivan Kožaric (b. 1921, lives and works in Zagreb) is one of the most important contemporary artists in Croatia. From the end of the 1940s on he developed into one of the central figures in the post-war avant-garde movements in the former Jugoslavia. In particular, Kožaric was a member of the avant-garde Gorgona group (1959-1966), in whose ‘anti-art’ the intellectual attitude towards form was regarded as paramount. His works thematize the borders between the traditional artistic genres. For the exhibition in the Autocenter it is above all pieces from his early oeuvre that are of interest – works in which Kožaric views the world from the distance of outer space (spheres and globes of a variety of kinds), and works that offer, as it were, a close-up street-level view (objets trouvés such as trash cans, newspapers etc.). In the Summer of 2013 Kožaric’s oeuvre was exhibited in Germany for the first time in an extensive solo exhibition in the Munich Haus der Kunst.

In her artistic work, Carla Filipe (b. 1973, lives and works in Porto) explores the boundaries between high and everyday culture. Her conceptual approach operates with diverse aesthetic and formal references. In seemingly naive, filigree drawings and collages, personal narratives from the artist’s own family merge with allusions to Portugal’s political and social past and present. The common denominator between Ivan Kožarić and Carla Filipe is the interest in deploying artistic forms of expression without any nodding regard to aesthetic conventions in order to decipher the signs of the world and to translate them into a relationship of tension between proximity and distance.